Introduction

I am Jewish and three of my four grandparents were born in
Russia. The fourth came from Poland. All left between 1900
and 1919, thus avoiding the Holocaust by many decades. Had
they remained behind, they would have been directly in
the path of the worst destruction; my maternal grandparents
might have been shot by the Einsatzgruppen at Babi Yar, my paternal
grandparents might have been gassed at Auschwitz.

To be a Jewish child in America, even in New York City, means that there
is a certain fissure in your reality. One the one hand, you may
(if you are a secular, very assimilated Jew) spend a lot of time
feeling like a normal American kid. Then from time to time people
remind you that you are not. Another kid in the schoolyard tells
you that "the Jews killed our Lord", or someone says that the Holocaust
never happened or is vastly exaggerated, or you read in the paper that
a KKK official in the South said that Jews are not white people. More
importantly, as you move through streets full of Catholics and
Protestants, most of whom treat you like anyone else, in the back of
your mind you are imagining how in Europe in 1942 you would have worn a yellow
star, been shot in a pit, or sent to the gas chamber.

About twenty-five percent of the population of New York is Jewish--meaning
there are more Jews in New York City than in Israel--and there is no
lack of Holocaust teaching in the schools. Mr. Natoli, the affable,
uncle-like Social Studies teacher, writes his version of the Santayana quote on
the blackboard in seventh grade: "Those who do not remember the past
are DOOMED to repeat it." He capitalizes "doomed" and underlines it twice for
emphasis. The whole school is taken to the auditorium and the brief
Alain Resnais film, Night and Fog is screened. Twelve year
old children watch corpses being stacked and piled, pushed around
by bulldozers, sliding down chutes.

But the message is very mixed. On the one hand, we must remember the past;
on the other, what happened there could never happen here, because the Nazis were
different, and we are not like them. You poke your head outside of
New York City and discover that there are people who never learned about
the Holocaust, universities where it is regarded exclusively as a
Jewish studies issue, and lots more people who think the Jews killed "our" Lord.
There are nice, decent, friendly people out there, with no overt sign of prejudice,
who when they read in the paper that a seventy year old former camp guard,
who murdered with his own hands, has been arrested ask: "When will they let
them rest?" Then, there is a vocal minority who run around saying that the Holocaust never happened;
that Auschwitz existed, as a prison camp, but that no-one was ever gassed
there, that the only deaths were from the same want and privation that
the Germans themselves suffered as the Allies closed in.

Here is the basic issue. In 1941-1945, a cloud passed over the
face of Europe, and when it dissipated, the Jews of Germany, Austria, France, Belgium,
Holland, Greece, and all of Eastern Europe were decimated, along with
Gypsies, homosexuals and millions of civilian bystanders to the war.
The Holocaust is a human issue; as I say in my closing essay,
it is but the largest and most significant of the many genocides in this
century, and one of many in human history. The Jews were singled out
this time and have been before (it sometimes seems as if anyone, on
his way to a fight, stops to punch a Jew on the way) but there have been
many other races who were victims.

An Auschwitz Alphabet is the result of many years of reading about
the Holocaust, and about the Auschwitz death camp in particular. My
introduction to the material, as an adult, was Primo Levi's The
Drowned and the Saved, which I have made liberal use of here.
Levi, to whom this Alphabet is dedicated, emerged from
Auschwitz still a gentle man, with a sense of humor and with
strong compassion. He is your best guide to these horrors.

Alphabet represents my own selection (macabre word) of the
most significant facets of life and death in Auschwitz. In twenty-six
"slices", I have attempted to illustrate the entire human landscape of
the camp: Who killed and who died? How did people survive? What
happened to the language they spoke? What rules governed
the perpetrators and their victims? Where was God?

There are two paths through the material. I have created page-turning
links that allow you to read it from beginning to end without returning
to the index. Or
you can use the index as a jumping-off point to sample those elements
that interest you. I considered but am in doubt about the ethics and efficacy of a
third pathway, which would put you in the shoes of an inmate of the camp,
with choices or events leading to consequences, eg, "On the railroad
platform, Dr. Mengele sends you to the right or to the left", with
each consequence--eg, being sent to the krematoria--linked to the
descriptive material here pertaining to it. I may still add this later
if I conclude that it increases the impact, rather than trivializing the
material or turning it into a game.

A main objective was to create a place in cyberspace that would bear
witness to what happened and attempt to give some kind of purchase on
understanding it. Everything important to us, or important to understand,
in the "outside" world, should be echoed here.

I have also attached some other articles and materials that pertain to
the subject--an interview
with Ken McVay and his Auschwitz FAQ,
among others.

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
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